Education Marvin Opler attended the
University at Buffalo from 1931 to 1934. While there, he was a leader in the University's National Student League. He then transferred to the
University of Michigan, attracted by the reputation of the American anthropologist
Leslie White. Marvin Opler's admiration of White's work was in contrast to that of his brother Morris Opler. Marvin Opler was interested in the relationships between
psychology and anthropology, fields which White had considered connected. Unfortunately, White was beginning to distance himself from the field of psychology at that time. Marvin Opler was granted an A.B. in social studies from the University of Michigan in 1935. After college, he continued his academic career at
Columbia University. There he had the chance to study anthropology under
Ruth Benedict and
Ralph Linton. At this time, Opler was conducting some of the earliest anthropological fieldwork among the Southern Utes. After completing his dissertation on the acculturation of the
Ute and
Paiute peoples in
Colorado and
Utah, he was granted a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1938.
Early ethnographic work In his work with the Ute and Paiute peoples, Marvin Opler noted that Ute and Paiute
shamans used techniques of
dream analysis that shared features in common with
psychoanalysis, although they were developed independently of Western psychiatric practices. He also did anthropological fieldwork among the Eastern
Apache tribes, the
Eskimo, and the
Northwest Coast Indians in
Oregon. Opler taught
sociology and anthropology as the chair of anthropology at
Reed College from 1938 until 1943. In 1943, Marvin Opler was appointed to the
War Labor Board.
Work on Japanese-American internment compared Marvin Opler to "a benign, giant panda." From 1943 until 1946, Opler worked as a Community Analyst at the
Tule Lake War Relocation Center, where his critical views of the
internment of Japanese Americans later led him to co-author
Impounded Peoples in 1946. While at Tule Lake, he kept careful records of daily camp life. Opler documented instances of abuse at the camp and worked with lawyer
Wayne M. Collins on behalf of the internees. His records included an account of "
The November Incident," a protest by the residents of the camp which resulted in the takeover of Tule Lake by the US Army. Author
Barney Shallit remembered Marvin Opler at Tule Lake both fondly and vividly: "with his heavy red beard and his slow, deliberate movements, he looked ... like a benign, giant panda." Marvin's wife, Charlotte Opler, enrolled their son Ricky in the Japanese nursery camp at the center, making him the only Caucasian enrolled there. Marvin Opler noted the parallels between the revival of
traditional Japanese
culture among the largely acculturated internees at Tule Lake and the spread of the
Ghost Dance religion among
Plains Indian tribes in the 19th century. Opler pointed out that both were attempts by the
colonized to reassert their dignity. Historian
Peter Suzuki writes that most of the anthropologists who worked for the
War Relocation Authority (WRA) accepted the government's action of interning the Japanese Americans as morally justified. Suzuki believes, however, that Marvin Opler's work was a model of the positive role that these anthropologists could have played. Suzuki suggests that Opler's acknowledgment of a wider social and political field as part of his analysis, Opler's criticism of the segregation of so-called "loyal" versus "disloyal" internees, and the respect that Opler paid to Japanese culture made his work such a model. At Tule Lake, Marvin Opler befriended several well-known Japanese American internees. One of these was
Yamato Ichihashi, one of the first academics of Asian ancestry in the United States. Ichihashi wrote a comprehensive account of his experiences as an internee. Opler was impressed by the work of
George Tamura, a Japanese American artist who spent his teenage years imprisoned at Tule Lake. Marvin Opler also co-authored an article on
Senryū folk
poetry with another internee,
F. Obayashi, which was published in the
Journal of American Folklore in 1945. In his book
Threatening Anthropology anthropologist
David H. Price discusses FBI documents from 1945 in which
FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover ordered an FBI investigation of Marvin Opler after the discovery of a letter bearing the initial "M" in a Portland trash can. Marvin Opler was questioned by the FBI. One of many anthropologists investigated, the bureau was seeking to discover whether Opler had any
Communist Party affiliation. He responded that the only party he had ever been a member of was the
Democratic Party, which he had been involved in up until he moved to Tule Lake. The FBI also discovered that Opler was held in high regard both by his coworkers at Tule Lake, as well as by the interned
Japanese Americans. One WRA employee informed the FBI that Marvin Opler was considered a "
wobbly," a "
conscientious objector," and a "long hair" by people in the WRA. This informant was unable to give any reasons for this point of view, however. The FBI described Opler as being "cooperative and courteous" and ended the investigation. After the internment camps were closed, Opler taught anthropology and sociology at various colleges, including
Occidental,
Stanford,
Harvard, and
Tulane from 1946 until 1952. In 1947, Marvin Opler submitted an affidavit in support of the restoration of citizenship to three American citizens of Japanese ancestry who had renounced their citizenship at Tule Lake. In this affidavit, he stated that, rather than being acts of free will, it was coercion, duress, and mass compulsion that motivated many of the wartime renouncements of citizenship by Japanese Americans. At Tule Lake, he had observed many of the renouncement hearings.
Social psychiatry It was in 1952 that Opler joined the Midtown Community Mental Health Research Study (New York), which hinted at widespread stresses and psychopathology among city-dwellers. Opler directed the Ethnic Family Operation within the Midtown Study. This portion of the project investigated sociocultural factors relating to mental health. Although Opler's work was intended to be the third volume of the study, he died before it could be published. The most complete draft of this intended third volume is housed with his papers in the Columbia Health Science Library Archives. His work in social psychiatry also yielded observations of differences in the manifestations of
schizophrenia in people of different cultural backgrounds. With
Leo Srole, he found evidence for an inverse relationship between mental health and social mobility. In 1957, Opler helped found the
International Journal of Social Psychiatry. In 1958, Opler went to work for the
State University at Buffalo, where he worked for the remainder of his career. In 1963, he was again briefly investigated by the FBI, but once again nothing came of it. In 1964, The First International Congress of Social Psychiatry was held in London. This conference was co-organized by Opler and the British social psychiatrist Joshua Bierer. That same year, Marvin Opler toured the psychiatric hospitals of Moscow with his wife Charlotte and fellow anthropologist Robert F. Spencer. Spencer later admitted that he was not impressed by Opler's abilities as an anthropological theorist. Spencer also conceded that Spencer's own abilities did not impress himself, either. On the other hand, some scholars, such as
Richard Drinnon and
Peter Suzuki, seemed to have more respect for Opler's ideas. Richard Drinnon believed that Opler's insights into cultural revivalism deserved more systematic study than they had received. One of the popular articles of Opler was 'Cross-cultural aspects of kissing' which appeared in the
Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality journal in 1969.
Family In December 1935, the same year that he earned his degree from the University of Michigan, Marvin Opler married vocational specialist and student counselor Charlotte Fox, who subsequently became involved in biological research, Japanese-American rights, and environmental activism. They divorced in 1970. Their children include Ruth Opler Perry and Lewis Alan Opler.
Ruth Opler Perry is a professor of literature at
MIT, where she studies and teaches English
literature, women's writing, and
feminist theory. Lewis Opler (1948-2018) was a psychiatrist and
psychopharmacologist who co-authored the
PANSS, a symptom severity rating scale widely used in the study of
psychosis. Several of Marvin Opler's grandchildren are also active in various fields of academia, including Dr. Curtis Perry, Dr. Mark Opler, and Dr. Daniel Opler.
Death Marvin Kaufmann Opler died on January 3, 1981. His memorial was held in New York, where he was remembered both for his scholarly contributions as well as for his work with the community. His papers are housed in the
Columbia University Health Sciences Library Archives . ==Publications==